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Leverage RPG: The Quickstart Job

By | | What's he playing?
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I’ve been looking at the Leverage RPG for months now ((I got The Quickstart Job pdf way, way back when it was first released, and preordered the main rulebook immediately after reading through it. When the rulebook went to the printer, the good folks at MWP sent me the pdf, which easily lived up to the promise of the playtest scenario. So, it’s been almost a year since I first looked at the game.)), planning to write a post about it, but I didn’t want to do it until I’d had the opportunity to actually run the playtest scenario, The Quickstart Job. Last night, I got the opportunity to try it out, and it did not disappoint.

As may be implied by the name, The Quickstart Job is a short, simple scenario that introduces the rules and structure of the game, played with the characters from the TV show ((And if, by some chance, you don’t know about the TV show, you can find the details here and here and here. It’s a fun, light caper show.)). The adventure is a quick caper, trying to steal some corporate records at a party, with a nice twist thrown in to force the players to think on their feet. It’s set up to be pretty much a railroad plot, at first glance, obviously intended to be run quickly with people who are unfamiliar with the game system, leading through the steps of the con by the hand.

This is a good thing; it’s what a quickstart adventure should do. It keeps the extraneous complexity and subtlety of the system off-screen, showing off the cool things you can do in the game. And the plot is not as much of a railroad as it first appears, something I didn’t appreciate until I actually ran it ((One reason I’m glad I waited until I had run the game before writing about it.)). The complication mechanic adds a lot of little side action, forcing the characters to rethink the plan right in the middle of things going pear-shaped, just like on the TV show.

System

Quick overview of the system, which is a heavily ((And beautifully!)) tweaked version of the Cortex system, called Cortex Plus:

  • There are five different roles in the game, representing broad areas of expertise – classes, if you like – shown in the show. They are Grifter, Hacker, Hitter, Mastermind, and Thief.
  • There are six different attributes, representing the standard raw abilities of the character. They are Agility, Alertness, Intelligence, Strength, Vitality, and Willpower. Interestingly, each has a strong social function outside the obvious function.
  • Roles and attributes are ranked by die type, d4 to d12 ((In practice, characters have scores from d4 to d10 when starting out)), and rolls are made using the die from the appropriate role and appropriate attribute. Extra dice can be added by introducing something new and interesting to the scene, called an Asset. No matter how big the dice pool gets, though, only the two highest dice are totaled for the result.
  • The GM – Fixer, in this game – rolls the opposition dice pool, representing whatever obstacles the characters are trying to overcome. The Fixer dice pool works roughly the same way, except the Fixer gets Complications instead of Assets.
  • Plot Points can be used to gain Assets or include more dice from your pool in the result of your roll.

There are some subtleties and other mechanical flourishes to the game, but that’s the core of it, and I’m only going to talk about a couple of other parts.

First, in keeping with the source material, the game uses a very nice mechanic for flashbacks, allowing the players to spend Plot Points to retcon some action in a flashback, showing how they set things up for an advantage that they now want to use. I thought this would be a difficult thing to get the players using, but they were all fans of the show, and jumped at the chance to use the idea. It’s really brought out in The Quickstart Job during the wrap-up, and creates a different way of looking at the game: instead of trying to account for every little possibility during the actual play of the game, where things can get bogged down in the minutiae, you can leave the loose ends for the end of the game and tie them up then, when you see what they are.

Second, Complications. Complications are really the heart and soul of the game. The assumption of the game is that the characters are obscenely good at what they do. They are among the top people in their respective fields in the entire world. So, it is expected that, as long as things go according to the plan, they will succeed. Complications are how you inject surprising things that aren’t according to the plan and force the characters to think on their feet to deal with them. Just like the TV show ((I’m saying that a lot in this review, and I personally think that’s entirely appropriate for a licensed game. In fact, I think that’s eminently desirable. If you’re playing a game based on a TV show, it should feel like you’re playing in an episode of the show.)), the drama and interest in the game comes from how the characters handle the problems that pop up to skew the plan.

Complications arise when a player rolls a 1 on any die in his or her dice pool on any roll. It earns them a Plot Point, and lets the Fixer add a trait to scenario rated at d6. This trait gets added to any roll the Fixer makes where it would apply. So, a Complication like Heightened Security d6 would get rolled when a character is trying to sneak into a building ((Or talk his or her way in, or fight his or her way in, or hack his or her way in, or whatever.)). Extra 1s can grant more Complications, or can step up the die type of an existing Complication: d6 to d8 to d10 to d12.

One of the beautiful things about the Complication mechanic is that the Fixer can bank it, and is, in fact, encouraged to do so. So, when a player rolls a Complication, the Fixer can make note of it and not introduce it until a later time, when it would be more fun. This might seem a little prone to abuse, with the possibility of the Fixer saving up the Complications to hit a player at a very vulnerable point with You’re Screwed d12, but it’s really a way to make sure that the interesting, exciting parts of play get used at dramatically appropriate points. And if your Fixer does that, it just means you are more likely to fail at that particular action, not that the job falls apart.

The entire game is engineered towards making the characters show off how cool they are. That means that, in general, failure just means you have to think of a different way to do what your were trying to do. Even failure in a combat simply means that now the bad guys have you prisoner, and the rest of the team has to try and break you out, as well as finish up the job.

The Job

So, how did the playtest go? Really well, I thought, though not quite as I expected. I don’t want to give too much of the adventure away, because I hate spoilers, especially in reviews, but here’s the high-level look at it.

I spent about fifteen minutes at the start of play talking about the system, making sure everyone was up to speed on how to roll, what to roll, how to use Plot Points, and how to get more. Then, I got the players playing Nate and Hardison to read the briefing out loud to the other players, and we jumped right in.

As mentioned previously, the scenes are set up in a very basic, linear, hand-holding style. That didn’t survive encounter with my players. They’re all experienced gamers, and all of them are fans of the show, so they took what they had and ran with it. The first scene was pretty basic, with three of the characters scoping things out at a party, and we went through that as written, with them making their notice rolls and getting – or not getting, in Nate’s case – the information they needed. The second scene involved an actual objective to achieve, and that’s where they went to town.

In seconds, there was an elaborate scam involving a cake, fake e-mail, a surprise speech, and the preemptive removal of a couple of security guards. The scenario gives three options to accomplish the objective, and they’re probably very useful for groups who haven’t gamed as much, or watched as much Leverage; my group came up with a strange mish-mash of all three, with some extra bits thrown in, involving four out of five of the characters.

I hadn’t actually expected there to be that much flexibility in the scenario, so I was a little caught off-guard, and panicked a bit. My first instinct, being less secure in the system and scenario than I might have liked, was to try and force them back onto the tracks, but then the wiser part of me said, “Nah. It’s a playtest. If it all goes to hell, it doesn’t really matter. Relax and go with it.” So, I took a minute or two to think ((Also, a convenient bathroom break, but that’s not all that relevant.)), and ran with it.

That was the moment when the game started to shine. Everyone was trying crazy things, everyone was throwing around Plot Points for Assets ((Which, for most of the evening, I kept calling Aspects. What can I say? Mechanically, they’re similar, and I’d just run Feints & Gambits the previous evening. But it was confusing for the poor players.)) and flashbacks, and I was layering on the Complications.

The game rolled along, and I nudged them past some points where they were getting bogged down by things that could better be handled in the wrap-up through flashbacks, and kept the pace going fairly well. Not quite as well as I would have liked, because I had to scramble a couple of times to figure out how to handle something, but that can be addressed by familiarity with the rules.

All in all, the game took about two and a quarter hours, and ended nicely ((Although, Eliot got pretty beat up at one point – no matter what the system, a sucky roll is a sucky roll.)) for the group. They achieved the objective, and helped a little old lady keep her home, and sent the scumbags who were threatening it to prison for a long time.

Afterward, as I like to do with playtests, we had a postmortem to talk about the system, and what worked and what didn’t. Then we called it an evening.

Assessment

I really like the system. It does what it promises to do, and it does it with style and flair. I have not seen a system that handles caper and heist play nearly as well, ever. Some specific thoughts:

  • The Quickstart Job seems to use an earlier iteration of the rules than what finally got published in the rulebook. Specifically, the rules for acquiring Assets and for Contested Actions are different. The ones in the rulebook are, in my opinion, cleaner and more fun.
  • Once the game jumped the rails of the plot, I really began regretting that there wasn’t a complete set of traits for the Mark – the main villain of the piece. And for the locale. It was easy enough to improvise things, but the addition of a couple of stat lines would have been very useful, especially in an introductory product like this.
  • The idea about using post-it notes to track Assets and Complications on p115 of the rulebook is solid gold. Even in this short game, there were about ten Assets created, and five Complications (some of which got stepped up as high as d12). That’s a lot for everyone to keep track of, and the notes were a life-saver.
  • No one in the playtest used their Distinctions ((These are another thing kind of like Aspects in FATE. They let characters either get bonuses to their dice pool or to get an extra Plot Point.)) to generate Plot Points, only for bonuses. This is, I think, the product of the short adventure and the larger-than-normal starting Plot Points for the characters. In campaign play, I think the characters would be more hungry for Plot Points, and use the Distinctions more to get them.
  • The game is really focused on doing one thing, and doing it well. By default, the situations for the adventures are going to be rather formulaic, just like in the TV show. That said, there are a number of hacks for the system to work in different types of settings and genres already on the net. For a start, check out Rob Donoghue’s blog on the subject. His Two Guys With Swords set-up makes me really want to run a short Fafhrd/Grey Mouser campaign.
  • The playtest scenario leaves out a couple of the coolest parts of the system in the interests of brevity. Character creation is wonderful and collaborative, and the basic assumption of play is that the group is going to plan the job at the session. And there’s great advice in the book for handling both of these things.
  • The game has a situation generator, which lets you randomly roll up the client, problem, mark, etc. for a job. It’s tremendous fun to play with, even if you don’t end up using the results strictly as rolled.
  • I messed up the fight action a little in the game, due to lack of rules familiarity. That was part of the reason Eliot took such a beating, though his abysmal dice luck was a larger contributing factor. Again, this will be addressed by more familiarity with the system, and was exacerbated by the difference in rules between the playtest booklet and the final rulebook. The two systems were warring in my head.
  • The game is optimized for five players. Fewer players, and you’ll have one role that’s not covered in a primary position; more players, and you’ve got some double primary roles. Now, in theory, either of these – or both – could happen even with five players, but the system makes it sub-optimal. It’s far from game-breaking, but could change the dynamic of play significantly.

So, yeah. Leverage RPG is a very fun game. It’s got me looking at the slot on the game calender that opened up with the demise of Fearful Symmetries and thinking.

Thinking hard.

But I think I will hold off on starting a new campaign for now. I think I’ll wait at least until the two splatbooks come out this summer. I’ve already got them pre-ordered.

I think I may run another playtest, though, with a job of my own devising and full character creation. Just to see how it goes ((Honestly. I can quit any time.)).

We’ll see.

***Super Important Edit***

I forgot to say thanks to my players for taking part in this playtest. I hope you had as much fun as I did. So, thanks to:

  • Penny – Sophie
  • Michael – Hardison
  • Sandy – Parker
  • Kieran – Nate
  • Aleksander – Eliot

Feints & Gambits: Drinkin’ and Fightin’

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Feints & Gambits, What's he playing?
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Last night was the latest session of Feints & Gambits. We had almost a full house; only one of the players couldn’t make it.

Mindful of the scattered nature of the previous session, I tried to keep things more focused this session, without drawing in too many extraneous threads to confuse the main story. This worked better, and the characters pushed on through the game, running down the leads they had, and discovering more information. We didn’t finish the story up last night, mainly because the one thing the characters haven’t decided on is what counts as a win for them.

I’ve come to realize that this is an insanely important decision for the party to make. In a lot of games, the victory condition is kind of a default for the game: save the princess, slay the dragon, rip off the megacorp, arrest the supervillain, find the treasure, whatever. It’s built in to the scenario assumptions from the start, and the characters are hooked into wanting to pursue that objective ((This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I hasten to point out. Sharply defined goals offer great motivation and a strong sense of accomplishment when the characters achieve them. It’s just not the only way to do things.)).

What I’ve been doing a lot in both the Dresden Files RPG and the Armitage Files campaign is letting the characters set their own agendas, and establish their own goals and victory conditions. With Fearful Symmetries and Armitage Files, the player groups are fairly small: two and three players, respectively. With double the number of players in Feints & Gambits, the decision process tends to involve a lot more discussion and debate before consensus is reached ((This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either. It creates the greatest amount of player buy-in, gives them the strong sense of being in control of their characters’ fates, and in general keeps up the collaborative story building that the game set-up encourages. But it does eat time at game sessions.)), and heightens the planning paralysis potential of the game, which is to be avoided.

When we got to about 11:40 last night, the group was deep in a discussion about the best way to proceed, and had started circling back on their own arguments, losing both focus and momentum, so I suggested we call it a night and move the discussion to the forum for the three weeks until the next game, and they agreed.

So, what happened at the game itself? Well, first of all, Nate wasn’t there, as he had to go return the van he had acquired for that thing with the Guinness. Also, he had to explain the damage to it. Firinne and Aleister were still in pretty rough shape after having been bashed about by the thugs the night before, but Kate was looking after them. Mark had the papers he and Nate had stolen from the lawyer’s office, which they needed to examine. And Rogan showed up to say that she had spent the previous day trying to Aengous drunk to find out more about the Game the fey were playing ((She quickly discovered that Aengous either didn’t get drunk, or that drunk was his default state, and he didn’t get drunker. She, even despite her shapeshifting ways, was not quite so lucky.)). Everyone regrouped at the Hole in the Wall to plan their next moves.

They pored over the maps of the neighbourhood that was being bought out, but were unable to discover any mystical significance to the sites that were being purchased. Kate spent a few hours sorting through the records from the lawyer’s office and discovered that New World Developments was owned, through a network of shell companies and holding companies and false fronts, by Doyle Developments, one of the biggest land development firms in Dublin.

With this information, Aleister called Robin, the friend who had inadvertently drawn him into this by asking Aleister to get him some pistols for self-defense. When Robin didn’t answer his phone, Aleister, Rogan, and Firinne went to find out what was up. At his place, they found a number of angry young Asian men who told them that Robin was in the hospital, having been beaten almost to death. They asked if Aleister had got them their guns yet ((I did this to make it apparent that, while the characters were free to choose how they dealt with things, events are transpiring elsewhere, whether they’re aware of them or not, and that the situation is not under their control. Tensions are mounting in the community, and will eventually come to a head.)).

Deciding that something needed to be done about the thugs, Mark whipped up a tracking spell to find them. Kate made Aleister a healing potion to help with his broken ribs ((Based on the Reiki Healing spell in Your Story.)), and they all headed out on the trail of the men who had beaten Robin.

They found them in a pub in northern Dublin, and Aleister confronted them. This, somewhat predictably, turned into a bar brawl, and we got to see what Aleister can do when he’s got some room to maneuver and someone to watch his back. Also, that Mark’s head is very hard. With the three thugs unconscious – one of them out on the street under a broken window – and beer raining down from a broken tap, Rogan and Firinne each lifted a wallet from one of the fallen toughs as everyone made good their escape through the escalating brawl ((Well, Aleister didn’t escape so much as he called the guys he had just beaten up pedophiles who had molested his brother, and then stared down the rest of the crowd until they cleared a path to let him walk out.)).

Aleister followed this up the next day with a phone call to the chief thug and made a rather chilling threat about what would happen if Aleister caught him south of the Liffey ever again ((When he made the call, I had a child answer the phone and call for his da. I was interested to see where Aleister would draw the line – would he, even implicitly, threaten the child to get the father to understand the seriousness of things? The answer was no. Aleister has scruples.)).

Meanwhile, the group decided to take the papers they had found linking New World with Doyle to a reporter friend of Aleister’s, hoping that the papers could apply some pressure without the gang having to tell the police where they got the records. I took the opportunity to give them a quick course in political leverage through the mouthpiece of the reporter: she asked if they had kept copies, and they sheepishly had to admit that they hadn’t, and then asked for a couple of hours to do that. She then explained that she’d have to verify the information on the papers independently before she could publish anything, and that would take a couple of weeks. They reluctantly agreed to that.

And Rogan went to one of her family lawyers to see what he could tell her about Doyle Development. The lawyer told her that the head was Sir Clifton St. John Doyle, a flash man-about-town, and a wealthy and clever developer. When she mentioned the papers, he pointed out that none of the information they had actually implicated Doyle in the violence, or any unethical behaviour. He also offered some ideas about why Doyle would be using such a convoluted front to buy up the property he wanted, including not wanting competitors to find out what he was doing and drive up the price. He couldn’t offer any other information about what might be going on, but he did offer to set up a meeting with Doyle in a day or two, and she took him up on that.

That’s about when things got tangled in a discussion about what the next steps should be and, after a bit, I called the evening to a close. I find it interesting that it’s taken them two sessions to come to grips with the idea that this problem might have no supernatural component to it at all, but that’s where they’ve arrived, and that’s good. I don’t want every story to be about the fey or other mystical nastiness, though obviously a certain number of them need to be.

And now they’ve got three weeks to figure out what to do next. I wonder what they’ll decide.

Fearful Symmetries: RIP

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Fearful Symmetries, What's he playing?
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My Fearful Symmetries campaign has come to an end.

Izabela’s player has decided that she doesn’t want to continue with the game. Seeing as it’s a two-player game, and the two players are husband and wife, that means the game stops.

What happened? Well, I mentioned last post that Izabela was probably going to be retiring, because her player and the magic system didn’t really click. Upon spending some time thinking about what other sort of character would be a good fit for the game, but less mechanically complex to play, Penny came up with a concept she really liked. Then she started thinking about building the characters and said, basically, “Ugh. That means that I’ll have to come up with Aspects.”

She took that as a good indicator that her dissatisfaction with the system went beyond the complexity of the magic system. And, given that she wasn’t enjoying the game, and didn’t like the way the system worked, she very rightly decided that she should bow out of the game.

Now, I happen to love the system, but I can see why she doesn’t. There’s a certain level of meta-thinking that goes on when using the Aspects and whatnot in the game: places where you have to stick your head above the character-immersion waterline and look over your Aspects and your Fate Point totals and create something new on the fly that will apply to a given situation. I think that, for some people, it quickly becomes transparent, and builds a very cinematic style to play. But if you don’t click with the system, you don’t click with it, and you never get to that point.

This is an important point that I have had to learn over and over through my gaming life: not every system is a good fit for every player, or for every game. Some players like more, or less, or different structures to the games they play, and if the rule system doesn’t fit for them, then every time they have to use it, it breaks them out of their happy gaming place, and frustrates them. When it gets too bad, they stop playing.

So, yeah. That’s that.

I want to thank Clint and Penny for playing. We had a good run: 15 sessions, nearly a year of play, and some good, memorable moments.

It’s been fun.

From the Armitage Files: Union Breaking

By | | GUMSHOE, The Armitage Files, What's he playing?
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**Potential Spoilers**

The Armitage Files is an improvised campaign structure. It uses a number of stock pieces, such as NPCs, organizations, and locations, that are strung together by individual GMs to fit player action. The adventures I create with it may or may not match any other GM’s version of the campaign. That means that reading these posts may or may not offer spoilers for other game groups.

**You Have Been Warned**

It’s been a while between Armitage Files games for us. Over two months. To be honest, I was starting to worry that disinterest was going to kill the game, which would be a shame, because I’m really enjoying running it. But this past Saturday, everything was in place for us to get back together. I even sent out a tweet about how excited I was to get back to the game.

Shoulda known better, really. Within five minutes of me sending the tweet, I got a call to let me know one of the players couldn’t make it.

But I said, “Screw it! We’re going ahead with the game! If everyone dies, It’s your own fault!”

The other players were glad of that, too ((To be fair to him, the player who couldn’t make it had good reason, and I might have interpreted his attitude as apologetic if he’d been man enough to call me himself, instead of getting his wife to do it for him. 😉 She made it to the game, by the way.)), because they wanted to get back to the game, which had been left in a kind of delicate spot.

The investigators were stinging a little bit after their unsuccessful attempt at finding out what was going on with the APL, and seemed quite fearful of confronting them face-on again. In their discussions, they came to the conclusion that the leader, Fred Jahraus, and perhaps the other members who lived in the rooming house with him, were being possessed ((Or at least controlled.)) by alien entities. They started calling the possessing entities Tourists.

One loose thread they had was Wally Endore, the union organizer that they had previously met at Hutchinson Manufacturing, and whom they had seen visiting the Jahraus house. Rather than face Jahraus himself again without more information, they decided to try and figure out what Endore’s angle was – he had seemed fairly innocuous when they had previously met him.

They found that he had moved out of his previous rooming house in Kingsport, and had to track down the day foreman from the factory to try and find out where he was. Roxy, still sporting a fierce black eye from her encounter with Jahraus, implied that Endore was mixed up with something illegal and people who wouldn’t hesitate to blacken a woman’s eye ((She neglected to mention the fact that her shiner was self-administered. Oops.)). The foreman was appalled, and handed over the address of Endore’s new residence.

They did a little digging on Endore’s background, as well, finding that he was indeed a union organizer with a backing organization ((I jokingly called this organization the Collective for Undoing Labour Tyranny.)), and had been working in other towns and cities to help workers organize. Then they staked out his new digs, finding that it was in a neighbourhood controlled by one of the new gang bosses that had come to fill the void left by Diamond Walsh. To put the topper on this suspicion, they spotted one of the factory workers delivering an armload of APL newsletters to Endore’s rooming house.

They followed this factory worker back to his home, on the far side of the harbour ((Roxy is really starting to dislike being near the sea. It’s the way she can hear whispers in the waves that makes her want to stay away. Otherwise, she might walk out into the surf and vanish.)), near the foreman’s house, which they decided meant that they might have pulled the foreman into something far more deadly than he was ready for.

So, they went to warn the foreman about Endore. He took the news with poor grace, saying that he and some of the boys would go and explain to Endore that he was no longer welcome at the factory. Roxy did her best to talk him out of this plan, but he wouldn’t be dissuaded. The best she could do was convince him to let her pay for a night or two at a hotel for the foreman’s wife and family, just in case things followed him home.

And so we wound up with eight or so big working men, armed with axe handles, pipes, and chains, going to explain to a union organizer that he should leave town while he could. Dr. Solis went up to Endore’s room with the men, while Roxy went around the back of the house to watch in case he tried to make an escape. When Solis entered the room with the workers, he saw that Endore was indeed trying to make an escape. When he saw who had come in, he relaxed and tried to talk some sense to them.

Asking if he could put his shirt on, he pulled a gray-green stone from his valise and showed it to the men, causing them to collapse in shrieking heaps. Dr. Solis managed to avoid looking at the thing, and pulled his revolver, emptying it blindly at Endore. He managed to kill him, causing him to fall out his window into the back garden, near Roxy. Solis also managed to shoot two of his escort, including the foreman.

In the ensuing confusion, Roxy managed to grab the stone and put it in her purse, only looking at it a little bit – long enough to see that it was carved with the same symbol she and Moon had seen on the underside of the bench at the factory. Solis got the injured men back to the foreman’s house, and treated their wounds, while Roxy got another of the workers to fetch a sledge hammer to destroy the stone, still inside her purse. Smashing the stone caused everyone who had seen it to shriek in pain and begin to bleed from their eyes and ears, but they recovered over the next few days.

Endore’s body was not found by the police, which has caused some concern. The characters aren’t sure if he was really dead, or if he’s come back to life, or if he was possessed by a tourist, or if the local thugs just took it upon themselves to make the body disappear to avoid a police investigation in the area ((The thugs had asked, very nicely, that this little exercise in mob justice not leave any corpses around. If they had to take care of it, they might be unhappy.)). Solis and Roxy took the purse, containing the fragments of the stone, back to Miskatonic University to dispose of it in their institutional-sized incinerator.

And that’s when Dr. Llanfer gave them the next set of documents.

My Fiasco Kit

By | | Fiasco, What's he playing?
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I’ve talked about Fiasco before on this blog, but only a few times. This isn’t a reflection of how often I play it ((Though, honestly, I’d like to play it more. The gaming calendar is crowded.)) – I find myself pulling it out when other games fall through, when a group of us get together to game on short notice, and to demo to people who’ve never played it. And that’s in addition to the evenings I actually plan to play it.

It works very much like a boardgame in that sense; very little preparation, everyone gets to play, and it’s over in a couple of hours ((I can think of some boardgames that don’t fit all those criteria. Arkham Horror, I’m looking at you!)). In addition to it fitting nicely into the boardgame timeframe for regular play, that makes it a good game to demo and run at conventions; you can get three to five people through a quick game of it in about an hour and a half, if you don’t let the scenes drag on too long.

Seeing it fill that niche, I decided that I wanted to carry the similarity a little farther, and I put together what I call my Fiasco kit: everything I need to run the game at a moment’s notice in a convenient bundle. It’s not really anything new; I imagine a lot of people have done similar things, but I’ve got a couple of comments about how handy it looks from others, so I figured I’d share.

That’s a picture of my kit above, and here’s the key to what’s in it:

  1. Fiasco rulebook. Honestly, I hardly look at the book myself anymore during games. The rules are simple enough that I don’t need it, especially considering numbers 2. and 4. below. But it comes in handy if there’s a rules question, and it’s good advertising for when I run the demos at conventions and such. Also, it’s just a nice-looking book.
  2. Tilt and Aftermath tables. In addition to owning the physical copy of the game, I also own the .pdf version. In an effort to simplify the reference materials I use at the table, and to save flipping through the rulebook, I extracted the Tilt and Aftermath tables and printed them out double-sided landscape so that I could fold them into a booklet. That way, I can save the binding on the physical book, or pass the physical book to observers who want to know about the game, and I’ve got all the info I need.
  3. Black and white dice. I picked up Fiasco at GenCon, and that was a very convenient place to snag a cube of 12 white dice and another of 12 black dice, along with their own dice bag. Now I just leave it in the kit, and I never have to go scrounging for dice. You don’t need 24 dice for the game, but getting the cube was cheaper than buying 11 singles of each ((Why 11, when you only need 2 of each colour per player, and there’s a limit of 5 players? Because the colour of the last die is wild, so I like to have an extra die of each colour to put on the table for when the last scene plays out.)).
  4. Playsets. As with number 2. above, I extracted each playset from the rule book and printed it out as its own booklet. It speeds up the time it takes to select a playset, saves wear and tear on the book, and minimizes the amount of reference material you need on the table. In addition to the four playsets in the rulebook, I’ve also printed out the free Playset of the Month booklets that Bully Pulpit have been producing, so I’ve got a nice, thick stack of attractive, colourful playsets for people to look at ((For those of you who care about that sort of thing, to get a standard 12-page playset to print out two-up landscape double sided and be able to fold it into a booklet, you need to adjust the pagination. The sequence needs to be 12, 1, 2, 11, 10, 3, 4, 9, 8, 5, 6, 7.)).
  5. Sharpies. For writing down the stuff you come up with during the set-up phase on number 6. I keep four sharpies in the kit, which means that there’s little – if any – scrambling after them during the game. Why don’t I have five? Well, they came in a package of four, and I figured that was good enough.
  6. Index cards. To write down the relationships, needs, locations, and objects that get created during the set-up phase; to use as name cards so you remember what your character’s name is; and to jot down the Aftermath scores as people roll them so that you can then go through the list and read the Aftermath definitions.
  7. A decent plastic folder. Single pocket, easy to wipe off if it gets something spilled on it, big enough to hold everything in one spot so I don’t need to scramble around for it. Easy to carry, with a fastener to keep it closed.

Like I said, none of this is groundbreaking, but it’s a little convenience thing that’s let me play a lot more Fiasco than I might do if I had to always hunt down the components.

And it means I’m always ready for a disaster.

Fearful Symmetries: Unmasking

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Fearful Symmetries, What's he playing?
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Friday night was the latest installment of my Fearful Symmetries campaign. It was a return to a more traditional style of session, after the experiment I tried last time. I didn’t have a lot of information about what the characters had planned for this session, so I could do very little prep, but things went pretty well, anyway ((And again, I credit the collaborative city creation for this. It gives me the framework I need to come up with plots and reactions on the fly.)).

We started the game in the manner I usually do in these situations: I asked what the characters were up to, and improvised responses. The initial actions were pretty tame, but then they remembered that, very recently, lightning had come down out of the clear sky and almost killed Emeric, and that they still didn’t know why that had happened.

This led them up Petrin’s Hill, waiting for a storm, trying to figure out how they had angered the storm god Petrunas. Izabela was a little nervous about this, because she had taken a look at the hill with her Sight, and seen the giant slumbering in the earth, whom she assumed was Petrunas ((It isn’t.)), and she didn’t want to disturb him.

Of course, in response to dramatic necessity, they were attacked that night by a dozen cultists and a storm spirit similar to the one that had set fire to Emeric’s rooms previously. He knew how to deal with it, now, and dispatched it handily, while Izabela used her whirlwinds to keep the cultists from ganging up on them. A little interrogation yielded nothing but demands that Emeric surrender his sword, Beortning, which the cultists said had been forged from a stolen piece of Petrunas’s soul. Needless to say, Emeric declined to give up the blade.

Well, it was actually a little more dramatic than that. Emeric said something about how, if Petrunas wanted the sword, he should come and take it, then thrust it hilt-deep into the ground, which shook under his feet. And then he couldn’t pull the sword out again.

In the meantime, the veiled Izabela followed the fleeing cultists back to the rock where the characters thought at least one sacrifice had taken place, and heard them converse with the empty air. Her arcane senses showed her a faint shimmering above the rock, which could have been either a veil or the concealed end of a scrying, so she didn’t want to risk attacking, especially with Emeric still back at the camp, struggling to pull his sword free of the earth.

When Izabela returned, she used the Sight ((She’s gotten pretty good at avoiding the Mental Stress from using the Sight, which is in keeping with her character.)) to check the situation out. She saw that the blade had pierced the thigh of the sleeping giant, who had twitched in his sleep, but that the reason the blade wouldn’t come free was that it was encased in a ghostly spindle of ice, marked with a rune.

With that knowledge, Emeric blasted fire through the sword while he pulled on it. A failed control roll saw the trees around them also catch fire ((This was a night of terrible, terrible dice luck for the players. I almost felt bad for them.)), but he managed to rip the blade free, and then sucked the fire back into himself, quenching it, and leaving a circle of charred ash where there used to be forest.

They were fed up with always being on the defensive, and Izabela summoned a spirit to find out who was behind the attacks. She was given a name: Nicola Thunderpriest.

This is an interesting artifact of the game. During city creation, the players decided that the priest at the church atop Petrin Hill was also secretly the leader of the Petrunas cult. However, in play, they kept that knowledge out of their characters’ awareness and, I think, began to wonder if it was still true – I was playing Nicola as a devout, if slightly worldly, priest who did his best to try and save Emeric’s soul when he discovered that Emeric was some sort of demon. I had built his character around the idea of a secret cult leader, so he had several True Faith powers, as well as sponsored magic, and a stunt or two that helped him with his masquerade.

With him unveiled, Emeric was enraged by the betrayal ((Interestingly, he had traded in his Aspect related to anger for one related to building a network of information, favours, and influence just this last advancement.)), and went off to the church to exact his revenge.

I liked the way things were going. Emeric was angry at the betrayal, and deeply hurt, and just (I think) a little bit tempted to give up the sword if Nicola could convince him that the priest would be a better guardian for one of the Dooms. He terrorized the priest and the altar boys at the church until he found the parsonage out back, where he figured Nicola must be holing up.

So, Emeric and Izabela burst into the parsonage ((Over the threshold, which severely impacted their supernatural abilities.)) and opened the trapdoor that led to Nicola’s work room. What followed was the first fight where I think the characters really felt threatened. I had built Nicola as a -16 Refresh character, and given him a few Fate Points on top of that, so he was no slouch. Add to that the home-field advantage – both his ability to tap the Aspects of his home that he knew about, and the effect of his strengthened threshold – and he had a good chance of really doing some damage.

The characters fought cleverly, using maneuvers to remove a couple important tools and enchanted items, though Izabela took a pretty devastating blast of lightning. Then, they managed to subdue him as he tried to tear open the veil into the Mittlemarch and escape. They bound him, and went to find city guards to take him into custody ((As luck would have it, there was a squad right handy, called by the the terrorized clergy.)) for trial before an ecclesiastical court.

That taken care of, they Izabela turned her attention to the Gold Lane problem. With the knowledge that an angel had been bound into the curse, she decided to see if she could find any writings of John Dee or Edward Kelley that talked about their communing with angels. A little investigation revealed that Kelley had once lived in a house reputed to have been owned by Faust, so she and Emeric went their to see if she could find anything of value.

Their search of the premises yielded nothing of note, so Izabela tried to raise Faust’s ghost to see what he had to say. She was successful, and had an interesting conversation with the dead man, who revealed that he knew of nothing hidden in the house, but that there was a place he was unable to look: up the chimney. Glancing up there revealed that the flue was ringed with Enochian sigils, anchoring a veil. They unraveled that, and found a substantial quantity of gold, as well as some preserved human parts ((Emeric thinks that they were being prepared to be sold as saintly relics to the unsuspecting.)).

The piece of information that Faust’s ghost gave them that was most useful was that he didn’t think that Kelley or Dee were able to bind angels, having little power themselves. The power was all resident in the shew stone that allowed their communion – Kelley had been working to twist that into a binding device, but Faust didn’t believe he had succeeded. That was enough to convince Izabela that she needed to find the shew stone and see what it could teach her.

That’s about where we left it, but there was one other game-affecting development. Izabela may be retiring to NPC status. Her player confided to me last night that she’s not having fun playing Izabela, and might like to try a different character. This wasn’t a huge surprise to me; I’ve been watching the player struggle with the character, and get frustrated with the spellcasting system ((There is no doubt in my mind that it’s the magic system that is the main culprit in the player’s dissatisfaction with this character. It’s not that the magic system is bad, but it is complex, and doesn’t have the kinds of support structures in it that let her use it with confidence. She likes immersive play, and finds that whenever she wants to use magic, she has to pull back from the character to fiddle around with the mechanics to build a spell, and she finds that jarring. Which is fair. Not every system is going to mesh well with every player.)), from day one. So, we may be having a new character take the stage while Izabela devotes herself to research.

But that’s something for another day.

Feints & Gambits: Developments

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Feints & Gambits, What's he playing?
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Last Friday night was the latest installment of Feints & Gambits. Five of the players were able to make it, which gave us almost a full house.

While we had fun with the game, this session was a little more muddled and directionless than previous ones. The problem was that I had incorporated a technique I’ve been using to great effect in other, smaller games ((Like Fearful Symmetries and Armitage Files, for example.)), and it split the focus waaaay too much in this larger group. So much so that what I had intended to be another single-session adventure is going to stretch to two sessions ((I say this like it’s a problem, but it isn’t really. It’s just not what I had planned, and I had to choose my stopping point carefully so as to allow for the attendance or non-attendance of the various players next session. What I mean is that I had to stop somewhere that it was easy for characters to enter or exit play if the number of people who can make it next session changes.)).

What I’ve been doing in the smaller games that I tried in this one is throwing out leads to multiple storylines, and seeing which ones appeal to the players. These threads often deal with consequences of their past actions, fallout from previous adventures, friends and enemies made, and that sort of thing. When I threw in a bit of a teaser about the Winter Squire letting one of the characters know that Winter was aware of the characters’ meddling, the players immediately started seeing if they could find out where the Squire hung his hat and apply a little pressure of their own. They also started trying to find out what the rules of the game between Summer and Winter were.

This play started to drag a bit, turning into the players making rolls and trying to unlock the exposition dump they needed to ask the next question ((This is an approach much used in video games, and it works well there. In a table-top roleplaying game, I want to encourage a more dynamic, interesting approach, where the characters actually do stuff to find things out, and I need to figure out how to advance that idea more in play. For example, instead of “I ask around to see what I can find out. Is that a Contacts roll?” I’d prefer to see something like, “Okay, well, Seamus down at the Cobblestone used to be in The Sunshine Boys. I’ll try and track him down so I can ask him about the Snow Birds.”)), so I decided to pull in one of the other threads for the game, having an old squad-mate of Aleister’s show up an ask him to get some handguns. A little investigation on this led to the discovery that there had been an escalation in violence against Asians in a neighbourhood in the South Dublin suburbs, with the locals of the opinion that it’s part of a plan to get the owners to sell off their homes and businesses to a developer.

In the midst of it all, Kate had had a chat with Mad Mary, and got a cryptic little prophecy that they’ve been trying to decipher, seeing where it applies ((And I’m not telling. Not yet, anyway.)).

The violence in South Dublin seemed to be the more pressing concern – everyone figured that the Winter Court wasn’t going anywhere  – so they headed off on a two-pronged approach. One team would walk through the area disguised as young Pakistani men, while the other would try and break into the offices of the lawyers handling the offers to purchase to try and find out who was behind them.

I jumped back and forth between these two scenes, intercutting to try and keep everyone involved and interested. The bait team got jumped and quickly took out their attackers, but the police showed up, so they were unable to interrogate their prisoners. The burglary team got in and got the files, but left some pretty obvious evidence of their presence because of the necessity of using evocation to get through a couple of barriers.

That’s where we wrapped things up. We hadn’t got all that much done, but again that was a result of the way I had split the focus. If I want to keep a more episodic style of game, I need to present a more obvious path forward for the characters, rather than a myriad of possible options, none of which look better than the others ((There’s a fine line between this and railroading. I want the characters to have freedom to choose what they want to do, and which approach they want to take, but I know the group likes some direction – they want there to be a story there for them to find, not just wander around hoping something interesting happens. And they don’t want to spend hours debating between options that look equally good or bad to them. So, providing a clear path forward, or maybe a couple that have very obvious pros and cons, gives them the support to make decisions and drive the story.)). I was very happy that they split the party the way they did; that’s usually a big mistake in roleplaying games, but works fine in DFRPG, due to the emphasis on narrative systems and the empowerment of players in determining when they’re in real danger.

Next time, though, I’m gonna run it a bit tighter.

Dateline – Gammatoba

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Gammatoba, What's he playing?
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The Sunday before last ((I’m really getting behind on these posts, aren’t I? Sorry about that. I’m trying to catch up, but there is another demand on my time that actually has a deadline, so it’s getting priority.)) was the second installment of the Gammatoba mini-campaign. We were only one person short of a full complement, which meant six players clustered around the table.

When we’d left things last time, our intrepid mutant heroes had killed a strange giant beetle in a crashed flying saucer. They decided that bringing back a real flying saucer would be a great way to prove their worth to the Fort LoGray Legion, thus earning their stripes. To that end, they began exploring the ship, which proved to be much larger on the inside than on the outside ((As such spaceships often do.)).

Along the way, they rescued two prisoners of the aliens, who decided to join the group ((These are, of course, the characters of the two players who couldn’t make the fist session.)), and looted a nice pile of Omega Tech. They spent some times and Science checks on trying to figure out how they could get the ship back in the air, and found that there were two main problems: the engines and computers were both offline.

To my immense surprise, they decided to split up, one group going down to the engine room and one to find the computer core. I hadn’t expected this, so the big fight I had planned for whichever site they chose to investigate this session got split into two smaller fights in the corridors while they were searching for the engines and computers. So, each group got a bunch of robots that tried to electrocute them.

Running a combat with only half the players involved was sub-optimal, but not as bad as I thought it might be. The wackiness of Gamma World meant that most of the players stayed interested in the fight that they weren’t in, looking for the cool stuff to happen. That was an unexpected bonus; still, I tried to get through these two fights as quickly as possible.

That’s about when I realized that I didn’t have a good, thematic encounter left for the big fight of the session. I had a number of encounters that would have kinda worked, but they would have been out-of-place, and I really wanted to use them in other situations, like when the characters have to go out into Great City One looking for spaceship parts.

So, I stalled a little bit, letting the group in the computer room fiddle with getting the computers on, and finding out that they didn’t have enough power to operate at full capacity. They did have enough juice to give them a basic diagnostic of the ship and point them to the engine room, though, so at least I got the group back together.

By the time we got to the engine room, I had decided to throw a couple of orlens at the party ((Yeah, it didn’t make any better thematic sense than the encounters I had prepared, but orlens are cool, and I had them bickering with each other about how they should have known other people would be investigating the ship, as well.)). I hadn’t prepped a stat sheet for them, like I usually do, so I ran them straight out of the book, and that worked better than I had feared.

It was a pretty good fight, but the team is loaded down with Omega Tech, so it wasn’t as tough as I thought it would be ((Something for me to keep in mind for the next session.)). The group managed to get the laser defenses operational, which helped them take out the monsters, and now they have a (broken) flying saucer. Next session is going to start with them trying to figure out what’s wrong with the engines.

Because this is a mini-campaign, I’m not bothering with experience points. Instead, I’m just letting the characters level up at the end of certain sessions, and I’ve decided that this session was one of them. Next session, the gang is going to be second level. We’ll see how that goes.

Fearful Symmetries: Trial (In More Ways Than One)

By | | Dresden Files Playtest, Dresden Files RPG, What's he playing?
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This post has been delayed, because I’ve needed to do some thinking and formalizing the stuff I’m going to say here. The reason is that I tried something kind of new to me in the last session, inspired by reading games like Leverage RPG and Apocalypse World. It was an experiment in a different narrative structure to the adventure, breaking away from the start-middle-end assumption and defined events to something more free-form and collaborative.

What does that all mean? Well, basically, it means I ran this session as a flashback episode.

At the end of the previous session, we left things with our heroes about to descend on the house where, they were told, a cell of Catholic spies were based. They wanted to bring these spies in and thereby clear Emeric’s name of charges of espionage. In the time between that session and this past one, I had been thinking about the kind of game this has become, and how I wanted to provide a few more options for the characters, and how I didn’t really want this round-up of a spy network to be a kick-in-the-door-kill-the-bad-guys scenario ((There’s nothing wrong with those, but there’s been quite a few of those in this campaign, and I wanted to offer some possibilities of different kinds of solutions.)). On the other hand, the characters are good at that kind of thing, so I didn’t want to take that option totally off the table.

As I was thinking about this, I remembered a couple of off-hand comments that my players had made about not getting a lot of use out of their social skills, and about some of their goals – specifically, about wanting to become more involved in keeping Prague safe in the face of the impending arrival of the Catholic League. Both those things implied wanting to be more involved in the upper levels of society in the city, so I wanted to give them the opportunity to make that happen, too.

Apocalypse World offers some interesting perspective on creating scenarios: don’t do it. Play to find out what happens. And Leverage RPG allows the use of flashbacks to establish facts in the past for effect in the current game. And we’ve all seen and loved movies and TV shows that start in media res and then fill in the backstory as we go along ((Things like The Usual Suspects or Sunset Boulevard or the Nevada Day episodes of Studio 60 for example.)). I got this idea stuck in my head that it would be fun to do a game like that, giving a lot of the creative control over to the players to decide how they managed to get to their current situation, and then letting them use that stuff to get them out of it.

It was a big enough departure from the usual way we do things that I spent a lot of time agonizing about whether I should try this or not. Finally, I did what I should have done in the first place: I talked to my players about it ((To be fair, I talked to one of my players about it, and she talked to the other player about it. This works because they are husband and wife.)). They agreed that they’d be interested in trying it, but that they didn’t want to waste the evening if it turned out the approach crashed and burned. I thought about that, and said that I could build in some trap doors to abandon this approach in favour of our more traditional one if we felt it wasn’t working.

Based on that feedback, I went ahead and figured out what sort of structure this experiment was going to use, and how I wanted to incorporate the mechanics of the game into the story we were telling. My primary goals were:

  • Provide a way for the characters to begin interacting with the nobles of Prague.
  • Give them some use for their social abilities, ideally through some Social Conflict.
  • Let them write as much of the backstory as they wanted to.
  • Make sure we all had fun ((Of course, this is the most important point of consideration. The only reason it’s listed last is because it should pretty much go without saying.)).

I went for a pretty sparse set-up: the characters were standing before a council of nobles in the throne room of Prague Castle, being asked to account for themselves and prove that they were not spies. There were about two dozen nobles present, but I figured that there were really six key figures that they would have to sway to their side in order to gain their freedom, and that swaying was going to be accomplished using the Social Conflict rules.

To this mix, I added some minor rules for flashbacks. Specifically, I had a short list of key questions that the council wanted answered, and each time one was asked, it would trigger a flashback to provide the answer. In addition, players could call for a flashback if they wished to introduce an event or fact that would affect play. Each completed flashback would allow the players to put an Aspect on the scene, which they could tap in their attempts to influence the nobles.

We got off to a rocky start, mainly because I hadn’t explained my assumptions and expectations clearly enough to the players. The fact that I didn’t have any real expectations of what had happened between them learning about the spy ring and them having to account for it took a while to sink in – they kept wondering what I wanted them to do, and I kept waiting for them to take the freedom and run with it. We hashed that out in the first flashback episode, and after that we were rolling ((More or less, anyway.)).

In the flashbacks, we found ((Though not in the order I’m laying it out here.)) that the characters had staked out the house in question, and that Izabela had gone off to follow one of the many men coming and going from it, seeing him meet with many servants of the noble houses and exchanging messages with them. Emeric, meanwhile, was spotted watching the house and pulled inside to answer questions, where he managed to convince the spies that he was working for a sympathetic party and had come to warn them to move house. As the last one was about to leave, he cold-cocked him to keep for interrogation.

The interrogation led to finding that at least one of the noble families was collaborating with the spies, and that there was evidence of this collaboration hidden in a cemetery near the now-burned-out Malvora manor. Izabela made a deal with another captured spy to let him leave the city in hopes that they might still be able to broker a deal with the Catholic League that would prevent the bloodshed she knows is coming ((I’ve decided that, though we’re going with most of the historical facts of the Thirty Years’ War as of 1620, the actions of the characters have a chance of changing how things happen, and she’s trying to do just that.)), which kind-of upset Emeric.

In helping the spy escape the city, she faked an explosion, which stirred up the guards. As Emeric is already being sought as a spy, they tried to disguise themselves as a housemaid bringing her drunk master home in a wheelbarrow to get across the Charles Bridge and retrieve the evidence. It kind of went south, and they wound up under arrest, but their friend Captain Amiel was in charge, and so they wound up in front of the nobles’ council with a chance to tell their story.

During their trial – the framing event for the flashbacks – they outed one of the collaborating nobles, swayed a couple of others, and intimidated another into shutting the hell up. In the end, they took the whole gang over to the cemetery, got the evidence, and proved their innocence, as well as making some powerful and valuable friends among the nobility.

So, how did things work overall? I’d call it a qualified success. Here are some things I learned, that you may want to consider if you decide to try this approach with your own group.

  • Be clear in your explanations about how this is going to work, and what the players’ options are. We almost had a complete train wreck forty minutes into play because I hadn’t been clear enough. Especially be clear about how much or how little you want to be defined during play. Which brings up the next point.
  • You’re asking your players to essentially set scenes for themselves, and then play through them. Give them some guidelines as to how much you are going to let them establish in the scene-setting portion, versus what questions will need to be answered through play. For example, “In this scene, we interrogate the captive and find out that he’s in league with a noble house and where the evidence is,” defines a lot of things that might be more fun to come out during play. If you’re not cool with that, let them know so that they can give you something like, “In this scene, we interrogate the captive to try and find the extent of the spy ring.” Everything else comes out of the questions they ask the captive and the answers he can be convinced to give ((This is an application of the old writing principle of “Show, don’t tell.”)). If you make this clear to the players, you can avoid doing what I did, which was often saying, “That’s too much stuff. Let’s get back to the basics of the scene, and see what you can do in play.” Which is just another way of saying no to players, and that’s something I like to avoid.
  • Have some things in your back pocket to toss in if the players are coming up blank thanks to the choice paralysis. In my case, the questions from the nobles provided some guidance, but picking out two or three main flashback scenes that you’d like to see in the game and prepping them gives you some options if they get stuck.
  • Keep the flashbacks short. If they just play the adventure straight through in a so-called flashback, it’s not different than just playing the game normally. You can also throw them in out of chronological order, which is fun, but it requires that both you and the players keep more careful track of the other flashbacks, so you don’t wind up with a paradox.
  • Recognize that this approach is not going to work for some players, especially those that prefer an immersive play experience. Players have to pull back from their characters to set scenes, to call for flashbacks, and to decide what Aspects they get out of the flashbacks, as well as to keep track of the chronological weave you’re making – all the meta-thinking about playing the game instead of living through it as a character. A flashback structure demands more meta-thinking from players than the more traditional style of play.
  • I don’t think this approach is sustainable as a default game style. Maybe every now and then, as a change of pace, but too frequently and it would just get annoying and bland.

So, that was my big narrative structure experiment with the game. In the end it, it worked, but I’m certainly not planning on trying it again anytime soon. The bite-sized flashbacks of the Leverage RPG are easier to handle, less disruptive, and more in keeping with the genre, and I think I may allow similar things to take place in this game, but the longer, more elaborate, more gimmicky style that this was? No. It needs more work, and more polish, and more testing before I could say it’s a truly usable tool in my GM toolkit.

That said, many thanks to Clint and Penny for agreeing to try it with me. It was a fun experiment. And now we’ll return to our regularly-structured games.

At least until I get my next crazy idea.

Dateline – Gammatoba

By | | Gammatoba, What's he playing?
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I’ve been down with a nasty flu for the better part of the last week, so this post is a bit later than I had intended. Feeling better now, and playing catch-up.

Sunday before last was one of our regularly scheduled Storm Point games but, as I mentioned previously, we’re taking a hiatus to play some Gamma World. Thus, that Sunday was our first Gammatoba installment.

This game is working a little differently from the Storm Point game in a couple of different ways. First off, while we’re still playing quorum-style, I’m doing some hand-waving to have the different characters enter and leave play if the players aren’t at the game. I don’t do that in D&D because the party composition is such a huge part of 4e and I don’t want to have to do all the messing around with the encounters that I did in the 3e campaign ((Admittedly, such messing about is much, much easier in 4e, but it still produces some strange things both narratively (Well, the fighter suddenly catches up to you this session, after sleeping in last session and missing all the fun.) and mechanically (Differing experience and treasure amongst the characters make it difficult to properly build appropriate challenges).)). But in Gamma World, things are a lot looser, so it’s not such a big deal.

We’ve also added one player for the duration of the Gammatoba run ((Welcome aboard, Cody!)), giving us a potential party size of seven if everyone shows. That’s a pretty big group, but should be doable, though not long-term.

In setting the game up, I sent out the pitch I posted here previously, and got the players to each submit a short paragraph about their hometown in the Red Valley near Great City One and Fort LoGray. I also asked them each to give me a rumour, something cool they’ve heard about within Great City One that would be a good way for them to earn their stripes with the Fort LoGray Legion. This worked pretty great, in my opinion, giving us a number of towns in the area, a bit of an understanding of the political situation, and a bunch of good hooks for adventures in the ruins of Great City One ((It also gave me some real insight into what sort of game the players were looking for. Don’t tell them that, though, okay?)).

For this homework, I gave each of them an extra Omega Tech card at the start of play. It’s not a huge reward, but it’s a fun one. It also does a little bit – not a lot, but a little bit – to mitigate the high mortality of default Gamma World. Again, it’s not a huge impact, and I don’t want to completely defang the higher mortality threat, but I intended it to make certain that the party survived the first session intact without me having to do any dice-fudging.

And it worked, as far as that goes.

So, what happened in the game? Well, the group got together, looked over the rumours they had about Great City One, and decided that their target was going to be the Karney Key Library, near the heart of the city, in the territory of a mysterious gang known as the Mad Tooths. They bundled into their car, and drove down the highway towards the city.

I hit them with a gang of porkers on motorcycles, with some hybrid boar-wolf pets ((Yes, that’s right. Road hogs and schweinhunds.)), who took out the tire of the car, forcing them to start and fight. Due to some good rolls with some Omega Tech, the fight wasn’t all that tough, though there were some tense moments as a couple of the characters wound up split from the main group and thumped pretty thoroughly.

After the fight, there were some rolls to repair the car, and they salvaged one of the motorcycles, as well. Then they were off on the highway again. Where the highway crossed the Primter, they found a series of fortifications set up by the local badder tribes. Rather than fight their way through, they decided to hide the car and try and cross between the forts stealthily on foot. It was about this time that they asked me what time of year it was, and I told them winter ((I hadn’t decided before this point. Indeed, I had made up a couple of other encounters in case they wound up with a keel boat and decided to take the river into the city.)). That got a lot of groans, because crossing open ground in a Manitoba winter is nobody’s idea of fun.

Some decent stealth rolls got them past my planned fight at the Primter fortifications, but I came prepared for this. For this crew, I always try and keep a couple of floating encounters in my notes that I can drop in where needed. I was looking for a good place to spring the encounter on them, and describing the weird mix of timelines and realities in that part of the city, amid the normal industrial parks. So, I mentioned the machine tower from Xi, and the Ishtaran ziggurat, and the crashed flying saucer.

Yeah, you see where this is going.

They broke into the flying saucer with some good Science checks, and then started exploring it. The encounter I had prepared was a parn, so it struck me that this would be a good Alien-style scenario, with them exploring the downed ship while the sword-beetle stalked them from the shadows.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to do much of that. It was getting late in the evening, so I cut the creepy ship bits short, gave them some info about a monster on a spaceship that they picked up with Conspiracy checks, and let them face the bug in its lair.

The fight went very quickly. The parn was stunned for two rounds, and then dazed for the next two, which meant it didn’t get to unload nearly enough before dying. Still, it worked nicely, and was a fun fight. I pulled together a quick deck of only Area 52 Omega Tech for the next draw, figuring it made sense inside the flying saucer.

That’s when the hippogriff moment hit.

The characters are talking about salvaging the flying saucer and bringing it back to Fort LoGray. And really, I’m okay with that. In fact, I think it’s awesome. So, I’m preparing the next session to be about them finding out how to get the ship back in the air. I figure they’ll need some specific parts, some Science know-how, and maybe an alien to help them pilot it.

I’m looking forward to it.